Ministrado por

Pedro Lasch

Visual Artist and Associate Research Professor

Nato Thompson

Chief Curator

Transcrição

Education is really fundamental to social practice. And it comes about in two ways. The first is through politics, a pedagogy, and its relationship to emancipatory citizenship is well established. In addition, the ways in which art operates, or tries to operate within the public realm is pedagogic. So, I think the link between education and social practice is a very strong one. And needs to be more carefully excavated by theorists. Actually, probably by practitioners. The other issue I think that's very important about this and it brings up your question about the CAA, is how our artists educated for social practice? I think it's a difficult problem because the kinds of field work necessary, the kinds of the varieties of theories and the systems analysis necessary to do this kind of work doesn't normally exist within an arts school. But I've managed with the support of liberal administrators at Otis college, to do a lot of experimenting. And one of them was to host a class in the middle of the College Art Association, when it came to Los Angeles. And what we did is, we took advantage of, and really revealed through this work, the network that exists between social practitioners. Such as your relationship with me and your relationship with NATO, and so on. And it tends to be a field where people are all thinking through similar kinds of issues, but are approaching them in different ways. So we created a red triangle with a carpet and a large banner by Andrea Bowers, and three circles of chairs. And then we literally pulled people like yourself, passing by within this College Art Association Network into these chairs. Three people per hour. With my students sitting around. And anybody from the conference could kind of come and listen to the constant informal conversations that were developed around the passing teachers, as it were. And the work that I did with Sarah Deleiden was kind of a cross between an art work, but it was also a class. And it served as a teaching platform and a demonstration model about social practice in a field, which is the visual arts. Which really hasn't quite figured out how to come to terms yet with these practices. There's two sort of, I mean there are many institutions within visual arts. But the two that maybe make most sense for me to address, because I operate in both of these. Maybe three if you count the city and the city structures. But one is the Instuition of Higher Ed. As I mentioned before, that's a difficult one particularly in the current economic climate. Where education is essentially becoming privatized globally. And I was fortunate to enter the education system when in California. It was pretty much free. Quality education was free for working class and people of color. Which was why in the early 70s, you had these really strong activist art movements. Because everybody had gone into school, and then grad school, and then come out and they were making art. So I think that presents a problem to begin with, which is how accessible is higher education and what are the politics around it. The other issue has to do with the systems of delivery. I think social practice people need three kinds of education. They need to learn how to make art. And of course art schools do that very well, particularly art grad schools. And along with that comes professional practice learning. But they also need to learn systems analysis, they need to learn how to think about of the impact of what they do. How to build engagement strategies, most young people I run into think you can send out an email, and that constitutes public engagement. And that works for some kinds of processes. But thinking through whether you're doing a process model, or a consensus model, or a one on one community organizing. I think students need that. And then the third thing they need, which is even more difficult to get in art school, because you almost need a university to do it. A student needs to understand significant kind of background information about whatever topic they're working in. So if they're working in the issue of criminal justice, they need to know about the criminal justice movement that took place in this country beginning much earlier, but really taking shape in the 90s. And they need to understand that history in order to operate effectively in the public realm. So I struggle with that creating a gradual program. And the curriculum changes almost every year as we continue to tweak what students need now within this larger educational destruction, is what I would call it, that's going on. How do you train, in a guerrilla fashion, students to be able to go out and operate effectively in the public sphere? My partners at the Knowle West Media Centre, plus the city of Bristol, plus the University of Bristol. Have been working together to construct an online program, as it were, that represents the voices of people in a working class community called Knowle West, in the center of Bristol. This has been going on for eight years. And my colleagues and I have been working to collect knowledge that exists within this working class community in two to three minute to five minute video segments. And for example, how do they bury people? How does wildlife exist in the middle of a city? How do they hunt for foxes? Which they still do. And these knowledges are being reassembled through a community process into classes. So adolescent psychology might be taught by teen mothers who are talking about issues with pregnancy, childbirth, and so on, and child rearing. And these two minute, three minute video segments are assembled in the classes, and those classes are assembled online. And the community continues to interact with forming and uploading working class content essentially. But in the community, there's over 1,000 people who've participated. Well over 1,000 by now. We have many, many classes consisting of about 6 to 10 to 12 video segments. So you can go online and learn about animal husbandry in Knowle West. So in that way, the project is very developed. I've always had a relationship with museums, but currently people are unaware of that history. And I think that just has to do with historical amnesia that exists in the art world. So I've never had a contentious relationship with the market. I've never had much of a relationship with the market. And that's the third piece here. So there's museums but there's also the market. And then there's art history. And in my generation growing up, museums were not as important as they are at this current time. They really served as one of many venues. You would do something in the street, and then you would do something for an art magazine, and criss cross double cross that Paul McCarthy started. Or you would so something for a television program, or you would do something in a museum. And it was all sort of equal. In retrospect, those artists who went the route of creating identifiable objects that could be collected, began to have their story told through those objects. So, I think at this point in time museums are struggling to catch up with social practice yes, but also performance art. In my life those two things emerged pretty much simultaneously, although we didn't call it social practice. So how the museum now identifies a work and puts it in its archive or collection, is a question that a lot of performance artists and a lot of conceptual artists are thinking through. I'm in fact thinking through that kind of issue with many of my past projects. Crystal Quilt being one that the Tate modernist collected. And it's actually interesting. Catherine Wood who was admirer of that piece first asked asked me if the curator there, would I like to recreate the work. And since I don't technically recreate works, I said I would consider it only because of the Turbine Hall and how beautiful it was. Over time the expenses of one hour performance at the Turbine Hall got to be astronomical, and the crash happened. So Catherine and I began to talk about collecting the work. And what did that mean to collect the Crystal Quilt? Was it an archive? Did it go in the Tate Modern's archive or did it go in the collection? And I was very clear I wanted it in the collection, so it was an exhibitable document as it were. And so the collection people bought that idea, and they collected the work. And it was fortunate there was this big visual quilt that existed. That could be part of the multiple representations. But what's interesting is that the collecting process is not over. And Catherine and I have talked about how the social practice aspects of the work, which weren't ever conceptualized as a display. How that would be expressed in retrospect.